Legalization of Home Schools Should Proceed

At a time when large numbers of mothers are joining the workforce
and pressing state governments to provide child-care services, as many
as 100,000 other mothers--and fathers--are choosing in an alternative
movement to make the education of their own children a full-time career
in the home.

Not seeking government assistance, however, home-schooling parents
are asking states simply to stop prosecuting them for violation of
compulsory-education laws.

Indeed, since 1982, 20 state legislatures have amended their
compulsory-education laws to permit home schooling, and a number of
other states are considering such actions. In Pennsylvania, for
example, an omnibus bill with a home-schooling section unanimously
passed the House Education Committee in June. Iowa legislators recently
approved a bill suspending compulsory-education prosecutions until a
home-schooling bill can be passed.

And current research indicates that the academic growth and social
development of home-schooled children meet or exceed the typical levels
of achievement in public schools.

Yet such major education groups as the National Education
Association and the National Association of Elementary School
Principals have actively opposed the legalization of home
schooling.

In light of the evidence available, public-school educators and
state policymakers alike should acknowledge the legitimacy of home
schooling and support its expeditious legalization.

Without citing research to support their position, public-school
organizations have suggested that home schooling is inferior to public
education, in its social as well as its academic preparation of
children. In the most extreme position adopted by such groups, the
naesp in its 1986-87 platform urged all members "to support legislation
which enforces compulsory attendance and prohibits at-home schooling as
a substitute for compulsory school attendance."

Similarly, the nea earlier this year held that "a child's
educational and social needs are best addressed in a school
setting."

What are the bases of these positions? Have these organizations
looked at recent research?

In fact, growing evidence indicates that home schools can contribute
positively to the social development of young people.

Many home-schooling parents argue that they are keeping their
children away from damaging aspects of the school socialization
experience, such as peer dependency, drug abuse, violence, and negative
attitudes toward learning. But they are also pleased that home
schooling results in a close family, where their children are each
other's best friends.

The only study of the social attributes of home-schooled children
found that such students score significantly higher than others on a
self-concept scale.

Another study, looking at teaching methods used in home schools,
found that home teachers, unlike some of their counterparts in public
education, do not humiliate their students.

And a glance at any one of the hundreds of state and local
home-schooling newsletters reveals that groups of home-schooling
families regularly participate in a wide variety of activities, from
academic fairs and field trips to regularly scheduled small-group
classes.

The academic results of home schooling have received closer
scrutiny. Nine different reports on achievement-test scores have found
that, in general, home schoolers score higher than their public-school
peers on standardized tests, and no report has yet found that
conventionally schooled students score higher than home schoolers.

Four of the reports of home-school success come from the departments
of education in Oregon, Tennessee, Arizona, and Alaska. Oregon, for
example, found in 1986 that home schoolers scored at about the 75th
national percentile on achievement tests. Home-schooled children in
Tennessee scored substantially higher in reading than public-school
students and approximately the same in mathematics, that state's 1987
study showed.

It is always possible to find flaws in a given study. But when
report after report arrives at the same result, the conclusion becomes
inescapable.

The fact that home schoolers generally score higher than other
students on achievement tests does not, however, mean that home schools
are more effective than public schools. Demographic data suggest that
children taught at home would also be likely to score above average if
they attended schools.

In Washington State, Jon Wartes, a public-school guidance counselor,
enlisted the help of six centers that test home-schooled children. In
addition to administering the Stanford Achievement Test, the centers
asked home-schooling parents to complete a questionnaire.

These adults proved to be above average in educational level: 32
percent had four years of college, compared with 19 percent of the
general adult population in the state, and only 3 percent of the
home-schooling parents did not hold high-school diplomas--versus 22
percent of adults.

The study found a weak positive relationship between students' test
scores and parents' educational level. Even so, children of parents who
had only a 12th-grade education scored as a group slightly above the
national norm.

Similarly, Maralee Mayberry, a sociologist at the University of
Oregon, found that Oregon's home-schooling parents tend to have higher
educational levels than the general population. And 46 percent listed a
family income of $25,000 or more, compared with 28 percent for all
families in the state.

Another factor differentiating home-schooling parents was church
attendance. Of home-schooling parents in Oregon, 73 percent attended
religious services at least once every week, compared with 28 percent
of the national population.

Home-schooled children, then, appear generally to come from families
with higher levels of education, income, and church attendance than the
general population; children from such families most likely would also
score higher than average if they attended schools.

In the states that allow home schooling, supervisory policies vary
widely. On one extreme, some states permit home schools to operate with
no more supervision than they give to other private forms of education.
Other states--at the opposite pole--require parents to have college
degrees or teaching certificates, or stipulate that home-schooled
children score above an arbitrary level on achievement tests.

A middle ground has been struck by a 3-year-old Florida law that
requires parents to keep a portfolio of their children's work and to
submit to their school superintendent annually either a certified
teacher's evaluation of their children's progress or the results of an
achievement test administered by a certified teacher.

In the first year of this law, 1,267 families notified their
superintendents that they were home schooling; 1,935 families did so in
the second year, and 2,894 in the third.

Just before the final votes were taken in 1985, the state
superintendent wrote letters to all legislators asking them to vote
against the home-schooling bill. Only the inclusion of a sunset
provision limiting the law's validity to two years enabled it to pass.
Gov. Robert Graham signed the bill despite the superintendent's request
that he veto it.

In 1987, the law was renewed by an overwhelming vote. Indeed, many
of the legislators who had originally voted against it shifted their
support: They had become convinced that home-schooling parents were
successfully educating their children.

Not one family's education evidence, they had learned, had been
found deficient. The head of the House Education Committee even
appointed as his page a home-schooled boy who had received all A's when
he first entered school in the 9th grade.

As more states pass laws that are friendly to home schooling--such
as Florida's--home schools and public schools can develop cooperative
rather than adversarial relationships.

The school reformer and home-schooling advocate John Holt suggested
that home schools are mini-laboratories where educational experiments
can take place. Perhaps some of the methods that succeed at home can
help schools overcome some of their most serious problems.

While, for example, many of America's children grow frustrated and
learn to hate books when schools teach them to read before they are
ready, home-schooling parents often wait until their children are
older--and their children become readers.

And while children in public schools are becoming increasingly
ignorant about American and world history, home-schooling parents are
reading biographies and historical fiction to their children--raising
young people who are more interested in Abraham Lincoln than they are
in the current rock star.

Neither conventional schools nor home schools have a monopoly on
good teaching methods. But as home schooling becomes legal, parents and
educators have an opportunity to open a dialogue potentially beneficial
for all.

Howard and Susan Richman, editors of Pennsylvania Homeschoolers
newsletter, are the authors of The Three R's at Home.

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